Neurofeedback in precision shooting: Corrado 2024

This is a narrative review, that is, a reasoned reading of the literature rather than a systematic synthesis, on the use of neurofeedback in precision sports: archery, target shooting, golf and some excursions into darts and biathlon. Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback in which the athlete sees or hears, in real time, a signal derived from their own electroencephalogram and learns, by trial and error, to move it in the desired direction.

Of the studies on archers, the review reports mainly those by Landers. In the first, from the early 1990s, twenty-four archers were split into three groups: one received feedback consistent with increased low-frequency activity in the left hemisphere, one feedback tied to the right hemisphere, and one no feedback at all. Comparing before and after over twenty-seven shots, the group with the consistent feedback improved its performance, the group with feedback tied to the other hemisphere got worse, and the group with no feedback did not change. Concentration and confidence, measured by questionnaire, did not move in any group. In the second study, from 1994, on archers new to the sport, performance was up by 62 per cent after fourteen weeks, with slowing of the heart rate and electroencephalographic asymmetries between the best and the worst shots.

From the rest of the archery literature the review gathers descriptive measurements: elite archers with more activity in the supplementary motor area and the cerebellum than experts and novices, and fourteen national archers with stronger functional coupling in the beta bands than fourteen provincial archers. There is also a study on twenty-eight university archers given a four-week protocol that amplifies the sensorimotor rhythm and inhibits the theta rhythm, after which the authors report greater regularity and accuracy of scoring, and one on two archers only, in which eight sessions reduced anxiety symptoms.

The less favourable findings are reported with equal care. In twenty-eight biathletes, three hours of neurofeedback raised frontal midline theta power during the sessions but did not improve shooting, with only a small effect on attentional focus. In eleven ten-pin bowlers, a single fifteen-minute session with a consumer device produced slightly higher scores and different anxiety scores, but no statistically significant difference. And the review cites a meta-analysis according to which the effect of neurofeedback on sporting performance remains weak.

The authors explain that they chose a narrative form because the field is still exploratory and the methods of the available studies are too varied for a systematic synthesis to be meaningful at this stage. They acknowledge openly the selection risk this choice carries and state that they sought a balance between studies with favourable outcomes and studies without.

The search was run on PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science, with keywords including neurofeedback, precision sports, target shooting and archery, limited to studies published between 1990 and 2023. The inclusion criterion was the application of neurofeedback to sporting performance, the exclusion criterion a lack of bearing on neurofeedback or on precision sports. Beyond the shooting disciplines, the search covered six subject areas: neurofeedback and cognitive performance, physiological aspects of sporting performance, mental skills and psychological aspects, technological advances in the devices, ethical and methodological considerations, and neurofeedback applied to individual sports.

The selected studies are summarised in a table giving, for each, the authors, year, topic, sport, sample, type of protocol and result. The text sets out the frequency bands these protocols work on, from delta to gamma, and distinguishes electroencephalogram-based neurofeedback from the forms of biofeedback that use heart rate variability, electromyography or skin response.

The review is narrative and says so. There is no registered protocol, no selection flow chart, no statement of how many papers were screened and how many included, no assessment of the risk of bias in the individual studies and no quantitative synthesis. The reader has to rely on the authors' choices, which they themselves flag as the main limitation.

The archery material is sparse and old. The two reference studies are by Landers and are more than thirty years old; the recent ones are either descriptive, comparing the brain activity of different groups without intervening, or have very small samples, down to a case of two archers. Several of the most cited results in the text come from other disciplines, darts, golf, biathlon and ten-pin bowling, and cannot be carried over to archery without saying so.

The level of detail is uneven: for the study on twenty-eight university archers neither the control group nor the effect sizes are reported, and the citation accompanying it points to the same reference used shortly before for a study on pistol shooters, which leaves open the possibility of a mixed-up reference.

The text also carries a claim that circulates widely and that the review takes from a third-party source without checking it: that in professional archers only 20 per cent of performance depends on biomechanical factors and 80 per cent on psychological ones. It is not a measurement from any study presented here, and it is the kind of number best not repeated as data.

Finally, the authors' conclusions are firmer than the material supporting them. The review speaks of the effectiveness of neurofeedback while citing, in the body, a meta-analysis that calls the effect on performance weak, a study on biathletes that finds no improvement in shooting, and one on ten-pin bowlers with no significant differences. The authors themselves, on the last page, write that randomised controlled studies are needed before definite conclusions can be reached.

For an archer, this review serves to frame a subject rather than to settle anything. Neurofeedback exists, has been applied to archery for thirty years, and produces studies that point in different directions: some find improvements in score, some find changes in the electroencephalogram with no change in performance, and a meta-analysis cited in the text itself still considers the effect on sporting performance weak.

What the material does not allow anyone to say is how much is gained, with which protocol and after how many sessions. The protocols described differ from one another, the bands to be amplified or inhibited change from study to study, and the samples run from twenty-eight people down to two. None of this amounts to a programme anyone could follow.

One honest point to hold on to concerns the difference between measuring and training. Much of what is known about archers is descriptive: stronger archers show certain patterns of brain activity compared with weaker ones. That pushing a beginner towards those patterns makes them stronger is a different claim, and that one calls for controlled intervention studies, which at present are few.

A note of caution about the devices remains. Consumer electroencephalography headsets are sold for relaxation and concentration and are neither clinical nor research instruments, as the review itself observes citing the literature: the one study reported here that uses one found no significant differences.